About Me

I'm a semi-retired professional man, living in the Midwestern United States. This blog is a personal blog and is not directly connected with my professional practice (although I may draw upon my professional experiences, as well as my personal experiences, in writing my blog posts). This is a place for personal, not professional, opinions.

09/26/2015

When the Americana singing duo The Civil Wars broke up last year, there was much speculation in the popular press that a sexual relationship between the artists, Joy Williams and John Paul White, each of whom is married to someone else, led to the duo's demise. That's what people do these days: instantly judge and condemn. People have always done the same. Today, however, we have the phenomenon of social media, which provides the perpetually ignorant with plentiful fora for instant gratification of their baser instincts.

Personally, the break-up bummed me. I thought that the duo were true artists who had a rapport that was palpable and precious. If they weren't in love, they convinced us while performing that they were, and that's what I desire from professional artists: sell me your art, make me believe your story.

White hasn't said a word about the cause of the breakup, other than the joint press release that stated that it was due to incompatibility of artistic desires. Williams has been a little more forthcoming, albeit not entirely. One of her recent interviews about the topic, however, interested me, more for what she observed about human nature and artistic relationships in general than the details of the specific relationship between White and Williams.

“It was like meeting somebody that I had known for a really long time,” Williams tells WNYC’s Death, Sex & Money radio show of meeting White at a songwriting workshop. “It was a very powerful creative connection that John Paul and I had.”

Williams’ husband, Nate Yetton, served as the duo’s manager, and their music took off: They won four Grammy Awards together, and their first album, Barton Hollow, went gold. But Williams’ creative connection to White disintegrated over time.

“I’m sad, because we don’t speak anymore. And, yeah, I feel like I’m looking at a ghost in a way,” she says. “And I think rumors, rumors, rumors, so many rumors were, you know, circulated …

“And I think that, a lot of times, that’s what people, I think, are gravitated to, on top of the music itself, was this sort of fascination of, ‘But they’re not married, but there’s this … there’s this creative connection that’s very strong,’” Williams continues. “And it was very strong. Until it wasn’t.”

Managing her marriage to Yetton and her artistic relationship with White was a balancing act for Williams.

“‘How do we stay connected as a couple in order for that to not be something that gets in the way or gets in the middle?’ And that was something that we worked really hard on in our marriage throughout the existence of the Civil Wars,” she explains of her marriage. “… Saying yes to something means saying no to something else. Saying no to something means saying yes to something else. You have to weigh … you have to weigh those questions very deeply. And um … that happened for me.”

[...]

“I wanted one thing, and he didn’t want that,” Williams says. “And a professional difference of opinion can feel very personal … I didn’t go through a relational divorce, but I went through a creative divorce. But it is difficult place to be in, trying to move forward in the public eye when there is a sense of entitlement that people have about something that is nuanced, way less dramatic than I think people would like to think, and difficult when I’m the only one sitting in this chair.”

That last sentence is chock full of wisdom from someone who has been in the cross hairs of public scrutiny. People rush to judgment about the lives of people they do not know. They confidently hold forth about what "must have happened" and feel, as Williams puts it, "entitled" to offer opinions on the multi-layered interior lives and personal relationships that are "nuanced" in ways that those who live two-dimensional lives are incapable of comprehending.

All of us possess interior lives that only a rare few, if any, are able to glimpse. Many of our relationships with certain special other human beings are complex and "nuanced" and sometimes opaque even to the two people involved. This must be esspecially true of two people who share the same artistic sensitivity to the degree that Williams and White did. It must have been difficult to keep coloring within the lines when each of them uttered a word, sang a line, or played a chord, and the other's soul began vibrating as if his or her partner had struck a spiritual tuning fork buried deep within them.

If they were in love or not in love or somewhere between love and not-love is none of our business. None of us can know because none of us is one of them, and even if we were one of them, he or she may not fully know. To me, the sense I feel is not morbid curiosity for why they split, but a sadness that they will no longer create the art that I found beautiful.

I picked the following video of theirs because in the brief in-studio scenes, Williams and White look, as well as sound, as if the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and that what passed between them, if not love, was a whole lot like it. Endure the commercial for the payoff.

09/06/2015

I am more convinced with each passing day that I need to either find a deeper purpose for this blog or to simply stop posting. I have only a few regular readers remaining from "the old days." Most of them seldom comment, so I have little idea if anything posted here resonates with any readers, other than with the occasional stranger, like the woman from The Netherlands who read this entire blog from cover-to-cover, sent me a nice email, then never returned.

I admit that taking the blog down for three years in order to shake a female stalker cost me a number of regular readers, and my switch from conservative "snark attacks" to more religious, philosophical, and artistic subjects over the past ten years has also alienated readers who got off on nastiness. I can still be nasty, but the difference today is that I no longer consider that a positive attribute.

The foregoing isn't a plea for any sort of communication, or (God forbid) whining. It's simply a realization I have come to that hosting a useless vanity press is the last thing I want do with the finite time I have left on Earth. If this piss-ant little blog isn't providing anyone with anything of interest, then I'll shut it down.

That said, I intend to focus in the future primarily on what T.S. Elliott called "the permanent things," and also on the mysterious, the transcendent, and the beautiful, at least to the extent I have any clue what I think those may be. If any such posts connect with anyone, if any reader, viewer, or listener says, "Yes. That's it!", then that will be enough for me. Making that connection with another human being on that level is what I set out to do ten years ago, no matter how badly I may have strayed from that path.

The following is a piece of classical music by Ralph Vaughn Williams, the second movement (Lento) of his London Symphony, that I have found hauntingly beautiful from the moment I first heard it at age 19 until this day. It is set to a very well-done video of photographs and Impressionist paintings that provide, to me, a perfect accompaniment. It is proceeded by a poem by Amy Levy that, for a number of reasons, I find meaningful.

I hope you enjoy the combination. I suggest you put on the earphones or insert the earbuds for maximum enjoyment.

A March Day In London---Amy Levy

The east wind blows in the street to-day; The sky is blue, yet the town looks grey. 'Tis the wind of ice, the wind of fire, Of cold despair and of hot desire, Which chills the flesh to aches and pains, And sends a fever through all the veins.

From end to end, with aimless feet, All day long have I paced the street. My limbs are weary, but in my breast Stirs the goad of a mad unrest. I would give anything to stay The little wheel that turns in my brain; The little wheel that turns all day, That turns all night with might and main.

What is the thing I fear, and why? Nay, but the world is all awry-- The wind's in the east, the sun's in the sky. The gas-lamps gleam in a golden line; The ruby lights of the hansoms shine, Glance, and flicker like fire-flies bright; The wind has fallen with the night, And once again the town seems fair Thwart the mist that hangs i' the air.

And o'er, at last, my spirit steals A weary peace; peace that conceals Within its inner depths the grain Of hopes that yet shall flower again